mountain sanctuary

The first block of university has been super busy – adapting to the changing my majors and trying to find some time for me and for the special people in my life has been quite hard. As you know in my “treat yo’self” blog post mentioned earlier I have been a bundle of stress and so since pay day was so fresh a couple of friends and I decided that we would get away from our busy lives and go to Mountain Sanctuary.

Mountain Sanctuary is a super wonderful nature reserve. It is located 2 hours away – so perfect for those who tend to get car sick. I personally felt like this place supper under-rated and I feel as though it should be spoken about and visited way more often than it currently is. My friends Caroline (who has a fantastic baking blog going on that you should visit), Keanu and Daniel hopped in the car on Monday morning and took a lovely drive to Rustenburg.

The day started off at 8am with a killer playlists and CDs from Daniel and Keanu. We sang along and laughed and at times, enjoyed some quiet moments enjoying the peace and scenery that was passing us by.

We got to Mountain Sanctuary by midday and hot damn was it was sooo hot – thank goodness. We are were a bit worried before the journey started as there were dark grey clouds in the sky at Joburg and it looked like thunderstorms were coming our way but alas we got to Mountain Sanctuary and not a single cloud was found.

This place is not badly priced at all and we spent R130 per person (+ a car) to camp under the stars and coming from a student that’s not bad at all ((:

Due to the monstrous heat, we got into our swimming costumes and putting our hiking shoes on as we made our way to the West Rock Pools. The West Pools are the natural rock pools found a little over a hike away. There have been warnings that there are snakes to be found on the path but luckily we didn’t see any. (Honestly I would’ve fainted and probably would’ve cried and panicked for the rest of the day). It being my first time here I was in such awe of the beauty of nature that surrounded us. I always have something to say but this time I was left speechless.

We got back to our campsite after spending roughly 2 hours by the rock-pools and decided to take a little nap. We were annoyingly woken up by the sounds of the mosquitoes buzzing close to our faces but soon enough we had fallen asleep and had taken a nice afternoon nap (which is not something I usually do). Woken up by hunger we decided to get the borewors that we had bought on one of our stops and have a braai. The thing that I love most about spontaneous trips is that you’re not always ready for what’s to come ahead. We had forgotten to bring fire-lighters and so starting the fire wasn’t as easy as it’s supposed to be.

We struggled for what I would say was a good half hour trying to light some sticks and kindle. I did come up with the idea of setting a chip a light and letting that burn. It seemed like a good idea at first but if you moved just a little too fast it went out. We finally came up with the idea to rediscover fire. Instead of using rocks and sticks like the caveman did, we used a lighter and deodorant. This was honestly the funniest thing I have ever seen because we obviously didn’t want anyone to burn one another and we didn’t know exactly to how big the flame would get so you can imagine how skeptical we were about this method – BUT IT WORKED!

After getting our bellies full of chips (crisps) and borewors rolls we got our sun-downers and enjoyed the descending of the sun and chatted about all sorts of things under the sun( well the moon and stars at this point). I was informed on how the previous trip that Keanu, Daniel, Caroline and others took to Mountain Sanctuary, they landed up sleeping outside and this time was not any different. The stars were all out and I couldn’t contain my little kid excitement.

The next day we were woken up by the warm sun (and alarm -grr) and then by the sounds of baboons and monkeys rattling in the trees. The sun was not friendly to us and so when we woke up, the layers we had put on the night before were quickly taken off. We decided to go to the pool before heading on back to the city life.

Damn what a beautiful place this was and I will definitely be going back and bringing all the special people with me!